Always a Choice
by Ilzalith
Summary: With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that death isn't that big of a deal. Birth, on the other hand? Birth in a world with chakra and demons and monkeys? Birth -life- is an entirely different beast. Cross-Posted from AO3
1. Birth, Grandmothers, and Chakra

In hindsight, death as a an event is made out to be way more than it really is.

Mine was probably not a very large affair -closed casket, secular ceremony (I hope), most of my relatives (of varying closeness in life). I'm willing to admit that isn't a lot, but I wasn't very important when I was alive. I had a fair number of friends I wasn't close to, was at best an average student, and didn't interact with my neighbors outside of saying ' _hello_ ' or ' _good morning_ ' when socially required. In life I was nobody important, so of course my funeral would be small -or at least I think it would be.

Birth - _life_ \- was another beast entirely.

I was born on the fourteenth of January -screaming my tiny little lungs out, like most newly-personed fetuses. Part of that was for the obvious reasons -the new sights, sounds, feelings- but I know that there was something else. As it turns out, living one whole life in one world, and being then born in another world entirely means that the differences are really obvious. When you feel your insides burning as a child -your mind rejecting what your new body has- you can't really avoid screaming.

At least, that's what chakra did to me - it's not like I can ask anyone about it.

It took an unknown amount of time for my brain to stop freaking out about the whole ' _there is a foreign thing moving inside me getitoutgetitoutgetitout_ ' thing, and another few weeks for my mind -my 'soul,' I guess- to actually settle in. According to my mother, I spent the two months being extremely fussy, and then almost immediately stopped -I even consistently slept throughout the night. At first they thought I might be sick, now she thinks it was an early sign.

By the time I was well and truly myself, I was living with an elderly woman who I assumed was my grandmother. She would read books around me, in what I eventually realized was Japanese. I couldn't understand anything she said beyond the most basic words, but I was probably in Japan (or maybe Korea -I was vaguely aware there had been something between those countries before I was born), and if I was lucky my parents were just very busy, and not dead.

Eventually (it might have been a week, it might have been a month -constant napping made it impossible to tell,) my mother came back -saying something about 'Mamoru-kun' and 'Kaa-chan'. I wasn't paying attention -I was far more interested in the metal plate on her forehead. It had an engraving that looked like an arrowhead with a spiral in the middle.

You could even argue that it looked like a leaf.

I started to cry. For my mother, who would probably die before she was forty; for my father who might already be dead; for myself, because I was probably going to die in some disaster or another, no matter what I did. Apparently, that hurt my mother's feelings, because she started tearing up too.

A while later, my father came back -with a bandana with an identical metal plate to Mom's, and my parents started taking turns between missions as much as I think they could. Mom would stay for a few weeks, and then I would stay with my grandmother for a few weeks, then Dad would come back and stay for a while, and so on.

That was my life for the first three years -trying to learn Japanese, learning to walk, potty training…. Then I started toying with chakra and my grandmother noticed immediately.

My grandmother couldn't see very well -she needed glasses to read, and even then followed the words with her fingers so that she wouldn't lose track. She obviously strained her eyes to see things clearly. I had assumed she was just a civilian woman. Considering that she hurried to the room I was playing in the second I 'pushed' my chakra, she was no civilian.

"Mamoru-chan... what are you doing?"

I briefly panicked, and then turned to her with wide, innocent eyes. "Huh?"

It didn't work.

"Mamoru, you can't trick me," she knelt to get as close to eye-level as she could. I never thought she could be that spry. "Do you know what that energy was?"

I shrugged, and looked away -I needed to avoid that question if at all possible.

"Mamoru-chan, that thing -that energy- you were playing with is called chakra," she paused waiting for me to look at her again -which I did. "It's a useful tool, but you could hurt yourself if you practice with it unsupervised."

I nodded, less surprised by that than by her noticing my 'practice'. Chakra was probably like a muscle, and kids would probably hurt themselves if they overworked it.

We spent the rest of the day in the backyard. I 'learned' about the Leaf Concentration Practice, and actually managed to keep a leaf on my nose for the rest of the day. Within a week I could keep to leaves stuck to my temples, and a week after that I could keep a leaf on every finger -as long as I didn't so much as _think_ about anything else. A few days after I showed my grandmother that trick (she poked my forehead and the leaves fell pretty much instantly -I didn't have the focus to keep it up), she went out for a few hours, and came back with a strange box.

The box was probably big enough to fit a baseball, which really wasn't that impressive. The symbol on the back -five circles connected by three lines- looked vaguely familiar, but that might have been the vaguely humanoid shape.

"Mamoru-chan, the Sarutobi clan has a lineage of prodigies in the shinobi arts," she spoke just above a whisper. "I think you might be one of them, given time."

I was a Sarutobi. I didn't know the first thing about the Sarutobi clan except that their maybe-leader died. I could only nod.

She opened the box, and it was full of… paper. A cube of square papers. Wasn't I a bit young for elemental ninjutsu? That felt a bit much for a three-year-old.

My grandmother took a piece of paper on her palm, and I… felt her chakra pulse through her arm and into her hand. The paper started to wrinkle-

No. Not wrinkle -fold.

She kept folding the paper until it was shaped like a pinwheel.

"Now, I don't think you can do anything quite like this yet, but if you can fold the paper in half with only your chakra, I'll give you a treat. How does that sound, Mamoru-chan?"

I didn't know how to say 'that sounds great,' so I stuck with "I'll try my best."

She frowned at that, which meant I had said the wrong thing, but she didn't reply, so I started messing with the paper.

By the end of the day I could make the paper bend -but it still wasn't folding like my grandmothers had. Either I didn't have the control to get that precise, or I wasn't using enough chakra.

Three days into my new practice, and my mother had come back. She walked in on me and Grandmother during another practice session. Mom asked Grandmother to help her with something at the entrance, and I got to practice augmenting my hearing.

"Mother, you can't just start training Mamoru without asking me. Do you want him to be enlisted at the academy at three?"

"No amount of Chakra control will get him into the academy unless we send in an application, Haruka -and besides!" Wow, my grandmother could sound smug. No wonder I liked her. "He was already manipulating his chakra before I started training him. Would you rather I let him hurt himself?"

That was a low blow, and my mother didn't really have an answer to that. Knowing who would win, I let my chakra slip from my control, and went back to my paper. If I remembered right, hand signs looked pretty complicated. It would be smart to get the manual dexterity down before I needed it.


	2. Parties, Interviews, Awkward Questions

The first time around I had been born after computers became a household item. There had rarely been times that I didn't have something to entertain myself with. I could just as easily do nothing as I could play a video game or read everything connected to Mary Shelley's life. From what I could remember reading, people were overstimulated when movies started coming out in color.

I was definitely having the opposite problem.

Toys are designed for children -no surprise there. They weren't engaging to my adult brain. 'Play' became 'work' the second I realized I could pretend to be playing in the yard when I was actually trying to exercise. I couldn't read enough Japanese to actually understand anything I wanted to learn, and my family only had so much patience and even less time.

I kept on training just to have something to do.

It was three long, agonizing months before I managed to fold a piece of paper with nothing but chakra. The crease wasn't as good as my grandmother's, but it was folded, and nothing else mattered. My mother was the first person to see it -she had been staying for a long while and kept her right shoulder wrapped up, which probably meant she'd been injured (at least she wouldn't be fighting, I thought). She asked me to let her see me do it, and then asked again for my grandmother, and then waited another week for my father to come back so that he could see it.

The survey came in, and the emotion was 'surprised'. Apparently, I was doing better than anyone had expected. I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not.

My 'treat' turned out to be more training -what I assumed would end up being the very basics of ninjutsu and taijutsu. My mother couldn't overwork her shoulder, but that didn't mean that she couldn't teach me how to stretch or take me out on walks.

Real ninja must be freakishly flexible if my mother could still touch her toes while injured.

Regardless, I spent the next few months splitting my time between training, also training, 'play' (actually training, but secret-like), and naps. My reading level had improved to the point that I could read most of the magazines in the house, and all of the books I some of the more simple books my grandmother would read. Among those books was what I believed to be an Academy textbook -' _History of the Hidden Leaf'_. It mentioned the Second Shinobi War, but not the third. I asked my grandmother about it, and she tried to explain it to me.

Ramblings about 'protecting your village' and 'fighting to bring peace'. I don't think she believed it, but she probably hoped that I'd buy into what she was saying.

The important part I got from that talk was that my parents were 'out on the battlefield, keeping us safe from our enemies' -which I took to mean 'fighting in the war'. That gave me a much stronger sense of time. I had been born within ten years of Naruto being born. That was when things would hit the fan.

* * *

All at once, two things happened:

The first being my birthday -I seemed to have forgotten all about it.

We had a party, but it was mostly my immediate family, a small number of branch members of some of the other clans, and -weirdly- Sarutobi Hiruzen. I supposed it made sense for the most important member of the clan to at least drop by. From what I could tell, there weren't so many of us that it'd be a problem.

I got a fair number of gifts that I would probably never use, and a set of training kunai from a scruffy-looking Inuzuka woman (and her daughter). Not a bad haul, If I was being honest.

The second thing came shortly after. I took my first trip to the Konoha Academy.

There was a bit of paperwork, and a brief medical check up before I was sent in for an interview. Presumably, the idea was to keep kids who killed small animals for fun out of the academy, but that was just my guess. My interviewer, Hideyoshi-Sensei, looked a bit older than my parents -probably in his late twenties or early thirties, with a goatee that looked to be a bit in the works. I wasn't sure why he was at the academy instead of on the field, but it wasn't my place to make that call.

"So, Sarutobi…" he drew my attention back to the interview. He'd probably finished coming to conclusions about me before I could do the same. "...Mamoru, correct? Please, take a seat."

The man was already sitting behind his desk when I came in, and I'd go with what I hoped was a more polite approach and waited until he said something before taking a seat. The chair was… not built for children my age. Once I was finally seated, I spoke.

"Yes, sir."

I could see a pencil moving, even if I couldn't see his actual workspace. He was either taking notes or filling in a form, and I couldn't tell which. Being short sucked.

"Four years of age, date of birth…." He looked at me, so I gave him the date. He wasn't writing that part down. Notes, then.

"I'd imagine you have something there that says my parents are ninja, right? Dad took Mom's family name when they got married." He was still taking notes, and I was starting to get nervous. The silence stretched too long.

"Yes, that's all in your file -but I don't need to know about your parents," he stopped taking notes and finally looked at me when he spoke. "I'd like to know more about you, Mamoru-san. Tell me about yourself."

"...I'm not sure what you want me to say. I like origami and drawing," Hideyoshi was writing again. "I dislike… well, nothing I can think of right now. My dream for the future is to reach the same rank as my father."

It was all so rehearsed. I'd had a week to prepare -which wasn't as long as 'until the first day of class', but it was something. My father was a Chunin, and it should all come across as reasonable and maybe a bit boring. If I'd played my cards right, I would get in and be as visible -or invisible- as I wanted.

The man was still taking notes.

"Mamoru-san… why do you want to be a shinobi?"

There was no easy answer to that question. I sighed before answering.

"There's a war going on, and I wouldn't feel right knowing I could help, and then choosing not to." The closer something was to the truth, the easier it came out.

We spoke for a few more minutes. He kept taking notes, but none of his questions made me any more nervous than I already was.

Eventually, he told me to go out and tell my parents to speak with him. I couldn't hear anything from outside -even when I channeled a bit of chakra to my ears. That didn't help my nerves. After an agonizing five minutes, the door was opened, and my parents came out looking decidedly… neutral. The told me I got in, and I turned to thank Hideyoshi-Sensei, who was standing with them.

He was missing a leg. Oh.

I paused, and while I think everyone noticed, I still said my proper 'thankyou' before we left.

"You're welcome, Mamoru-san. And congratulations on your acceptance into the academy."


End file.
